


The Final Trial

by Kettricken



Category: Clarissa
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-19
Updated: 2010-12-19
Packaged: 2017-10-13 19:40:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,176
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/141013
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kettricken/pseuds/Kettricken
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU.  What would it take for Clarissa to survive her story?  (Trigger warning for non-graphic discussions of rape.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Final Trial

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Assimbya](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Assimbya/gifts).



The Final Trial

The little dairy-house had no fit parlor for fine callers, but every afternoon, except Sundays, Sarah would announce Mr. Belford. Anna had learned to arrange it so that the kettle was warm for tea when he came. Their household kept no stronger spirits, and nothing that was capable of disordering the wit; the lady of the house would not have it. Such things were not befitting to the economy of two unmarried women.

Mr. Belford sat first with Anna Howe, as Sarah set out the tea. They talked only of the damp weather and Clarissa’s health. She remained ill, Anna told him, but she was much stronger. After several weeks’ repetition, that phrase had lost any potential for meaning; if Clarissa truly were to be stronger, Anna thought to herself, she would have no way to even say it. Clarissa, though, still leaned on Sarah’s arm as she came into the little sitting room.

Mr. Belford would have Clarissa opposite himself, and Anna relinquished that pride of place, preferring to watch and sea that no indelicate subject was broached. Anna need not have worried, of course; Belford kept his voice quiet to avoid discomposing Clarissa, and turned the conversation to rarified topics—English verse translations of the psalms, a new collection of Mr. Addison’s works, or the fine distinctions between the passions of the soul. Clarissa spoke of all these with the fluency of a first-rate education, but her eyes never met his, and she never disagreed with any idea he introduced. When the hour ended, she would excuse herself—she was still very thin, and tired easily. It was the only social circle left to any of them, and they had grown as adroit in its motions as dancers in a court masque—bending and weaving, never a point of confusion, never an alteration in the routine. They kept the dairy, and they eked out the interest from Clarissa’s grandfather’s estate, when the Harlowes bothered to send it. In an attempt to raise everyone’s spirits, Anna liked to joke that they were well on their way to becoming a sort of extremely young pair of Old Spinster Aunts, complete with a hapless, hopeless suitor. Clarissa did not laugh.

“He worships you,” said Anna.

Clarissa tightened and looked away. “I have no intention of marrying.”

***

It had been strange at first, for Clarissa, to share her bed again. She slept fitfully, clinging to Anna and then pulling away from her by turns. Anna did not mention any trouble, though Clarissa was certain she must not be sleeping at all, either. In time it had become a comfort. When she woke sweating and wild, Anna’s breath beside her was steady, and its rhythm calmed her back to sleep. When she rose before cock’s-crow and lit her candle for morning prayer, Anna called to her to come back; the bed grew cold, and it was too early to be so good. To oblige her, Clarissa went back and dozed until dawn. Her own strict timetable was the law of the house, but the practice of the house was more often governed by the needs and desires of Anna’s body. They ate when Anna was hungry and stopped when she was sated, they rested when she needed time to rest, and they walked when she desired to take in the air. It was an agreeable arrangement. There was no reason for Clarissa to think about having a body at all.

***  


The room is a little wooden ampitheatre, an inverted panopticon of boxes, scalding in the August light that pours down through the great windows and pins her to the stage. It reeks of unwashed summer bodies-- the populace, and the singular reek of the prisoners awaiting their own trials, and, since this is the trial of a lady and a gentleman, the odor of fine perfume hanging potent above it all--like pepper strewn liberally over a rancid stew.

“No medical evidence at all?” sighs the magistrate. His gaze wanders down to her lap, and the hands that she is clenching in the middle of her lap.

“No, sir. The event occurred two months ago, sir.”

“And if the event was truly so violent and distasteful as you allege, for what reason did you wait until there was nothing left to fall back upon but your character and your testimony? A character, Miss Harlowe, that is by no means consistent—a girl disowned by her family, then an heiress, or an angel—and then a willing occupant in a house of ill repute?”

He speaks without raising his eyes, and she can feel all the eyes of the audience in the Old Bailey following the trajectory of that gaze. She removes her hands from her lap, and recomposes them carefully. Somewhere in the room, she knows, are Anna and her mother, who could not exert their influence so far as to move the trial to the north, where she would sit only before a single magistrate. The Harlowes might have managed it, but the Harlowes have not come, save for her cousin—they will neither help her nor indemn her further. A conviction might restore their honour, though it can never restore Clarissa’s own—that is forfeit in the affair; but a failure could tarnish them again. Around her are all she sees are the faces of London rakes and fops, Lovelace’s friends and admirers, leering and sweating. They are a wall of perfumed wigs and creaking waistcoats, cheap macaroni shirts and lapels, a cacophany of apes in fancy clothing. It is wrong of her to think of them thus. If only they would stop staring at her, she might find a way to cast her own gaze with a more Christian charity. But they will not stop.

“Your worship, the reason is simple: I was imprisoned.” Her voice grows steadier as she speaks. She will not clench her hands. She will not swoon. “I was imprisoned in the house of Mrs. Sinclair, which I had been led to believe an honest lodging. After my escape, I was arrested and imprisoned again, and was consequently too ill to take any action. Your worship may check the records of the court.”

As the magistrate confers with the records, there are low murmurs and a few hooting cries. Where is Anna? Instead, she catches a glimpse of Lady Betty and Lady Sarah—Lovelace’s female relations, the real articles this time, not his counterfeits—seeing them more white and stony-faced than herself. They had been her allies once, but the trial has ended all that. Now she is the bitch who comes to see their nephew hanged.

“…be exact as possible in your testimony,” the magistrate is saying. “The accusation you make is too serious to bow to any ideals of female delicacy in your speech. That is a road that is now closed to you.”

“I cannot relate the details, sir, in terms either indelicate or frank. I was drugged, and consequently have no memory of the event. It was only upon waking that I knew what had occurred.”

“But if you were drugged, then how did you know what had occurred?” The magistrate leans forward. Lovelace, sitting below, is carefully composed, watching her every move. “Be exact, Miss Harlowe. What was the evidence of your own senses? What led you to the conclusion of rape?”

He presses her when the answers do not satisfy, further and more, until words fall from her mouth. She refuses to remember them. There is a break in the letter—a sideways line. A man’s voice and a woman’s resound in the crowded courtroom, weaving a careful fugue. Before her the waistcoats blur together, and the world has gone harsh and disordered, coarse faces in charcoal outline, while the lines of Lovelace’s face are fine pencil sketch, sagging into an expression of barely-concealed disgust. Behind him, though, a man is pushing his way through the crowd with a thick wad of paper in his hand. Clarissa’s voice falters, and Lovelace turns, then jumps to his feet. His complexion is ashen. He shouts out the man’s name into the silent court, but Belford does not turn.

Now that she is no longer speaking, she feels that she may die. Or it is possible that she has died already, leaving this strange lady puppet on the chair, with its grey wool dress and stiff fine posture and its mouth wagging open and closed, like a trap to catch a child’s fingers in. Closed now, and perhaps finished. Belford is presenting the papers to the magistrate. “It is one side of a personal correspondance,” he is saying, in a tight, angry tone that is almost too quiet for Clarissa to hear. “Lovelace will have my replies. My own guilt in allowing this despicable affair to continue cannot be ignored. Or forgotten.”

The magistrate weighs Lovelace’s letters in his hand. “Young man, to read these to the court would take a year of our lives. This is a place of evidence, not roman a clef.”

“Your worship will please forgive me. I have marked the more important papers myself. Otherwise--” He turns to address the crowd. “Otherwise, I can assure you that they are all from Lovelace’ own hand.”

The Old Bailey erupts in noise. “The letters! Lovelace’s letters!”

***

“How many letters came for me yesterday?”

Anna looked up at the doorway, the knife paused in her hand. She and Sarah had been chopping carrots and onions for the roast.

“I know my family delivered them here with the money yesterday, Anna. You have no right to withhold them from me.”

Anna came to her side, catching her hand, though it had not trembled. Of course she would fetch the letters, but Clarissa must sit first, and have a bit of bread for her constitution. Only five letters had come in the bundle yesterday. One had been from a matron filled with righteous indignation on behalf of a woman wronged, but the remaining were addressed “To the charmer,” and one to “Murderous slut”. They were no acquaintance of anyone, Anna reminded her as she took them, and so nothing to be paid the least attention—just foolish admirers of a dead man’s letters.

Lovelace’s correspondance with Belford had been pinched from the courtroom by a bailiff, for whom they had fetched a neat sum when he sold them to a cheapside pamphleteer. The wide circulation of the letters had been guaranteed, though, by Lovelace’s march to the scaffold, which had become a London legend: garter-throwing dandies and bosom-baring madams; Lovelace all smiles, bowing to the crowd, bestowing his lace gorget upon a red-faced youth, who whooped and twirled it around. Anna wished she had never gone. “I win,” he had proclaimed, wild-eyed, as the noose went ‘round his neck. “She is no more nor less than any other woman, and she is nothing to me—not since she whored herself with her own words before the whole of the Old Bailey.”

Clarissa put the letters aside without opening them. “Today is Sunday, is it not? Please have Sarah see to these, Anna.”

“Yes. We’ll have a quiet afternoon.” One with no reminders, she thought.

Clarissa rose and wiped her hands on her apron.

“How you must hate me,” Anna blurted. “You live, but this life of pain and infamy—you were always wiser and better than me. I acted wrongly. I should never have forced you—I am no better than… no better.”

(It was nearly the end of summer by the time Anna and her mother found her, ill and slowly starving, ruined, in the care of strangers. “He is a true monster,” Mrs. Howe had said, stroking Clarissa’s hair. “If only to protect others from what you have suffered, he must be hanged. In the absence of your own family’s guidance, you must be my child and bow to mine in this. You must recover your strength and go to the law. I will not permit any disobedience on this point.”

“No,” she said. “I will not murder him. I have forgiven him, and I pity him. The rest lies in the hands of God. I am finished.”

Then Anna’s strong, trembling voice: “You are not finished, Clary. I will not have it. God is all-forgiving, but it is arrogance to pretend the same yourself. And Clarissa--” -a deep breath, as Clarissa’s heart stood still in her chest-- “If you forgive him now, then I promise that I shall never forgive you. You will die clean, but I shall die in sin and rancour, I swear it before God. Forgive him, and you murder my heart.”)

What response could have been possible? And what response was possible now? Hadn’t her choices always withered away into nothing, just in the moment when she felt surest of grasping them? Anna stood before her, red-faced in her misery. Clarissa leaned forward and kissed her. Her breath was cool against the flushed cheek.

“I forgive you, Anna Howe.”


End file.
